The Queen
slowly paints her lips the color of fruit
-flesh of every peach,
homeland of licentiousness,
dream framed by a mouth’s corners-.
Her body is blessed,
her eyes large with new growth,
her face, her word;
and clothing makes her uncomfortable,
her blood,
her hair is eaten away by silence,
her wounds fill up with holes...
and she knows it.
She cuts her arms,
chews her legs,
calls herself goddess,
faultless fairy queen,
like when she was a child...
and she does not know it.
She spits up bile on her miniskirt
and stops being who she is
so as to be
who she thinks she should be;
and yet she isn’t.
But from one side of the mirror,
blind to harvests gone by,
untouched by the corruption of trickery,
still innocent,
everlasting,
she is again
the shy girl
who said "no" with her silence,
the unfinished woman
who flees from love as from a punishment
and who uses up
the coherence of life
among guilt and pills,
among men and sorrow,
among the shadows of a house
that has hidden, among so many things,
the crown that is hers.
She looks at herself from a distance;
I also watch her from far away;
I also have resigned myself to silence.
At least I know he’s flying;
his wings are not soaked
by my tears.
-Isabel Cruz Bernal
As on that evening, never as many shouts
and afterwards only blood and silence,
the blind search for a truth
when resistance and beating the chest is barely enough.
and resilience is not even an option,
when the breath exhausts all bureaucracy
and there is no residue, or matter, that keeps
in this effort the sweet color of your voice,
I dream again your desire,
your body begs me to look for you with mine,
that I search for you,
that I search for them.
since surviving here
is not enough.
And then amidst the rain and blasphemy,
the threat and the dark slap of harassment
amidst the excess but hidden pain
and the fear they ripped from me with you inside,
I resolve to change the course of waiting.
and we are this glut and desolation,
and we are the lack of patience of the bereft of everything,
and we are you and me and my shovel,
and January 26 of the year 2017,
and your face the true correction
of this official fight,
and we are the absences, the families,
the 895 women who due to their own misfortune
also give me shelter,
and we are the 295 bodies from which words were stripped,
and the 18 thousand charred fragments,
and a country, Yosimar,
a country,
that seeks out the smallest sigh amidst the screaming
in order to survive.
that the world,
its still looking for you.
Where are you?
no one looks for you.
And no one will claim your body
when you go missing,
because when you do go missing
in real life,
no one will miss you,
since, even though you’ve died
you won’t have died
not even in someone’s
memory.
there’s not even silence,
because no one takes you for dead,
because you don’t exist